snark: a (well-deserved) attitude of mocking irreverence and sarcasm

May 10, 2019

The word dates from 1935-40, and is out of fashion, but it seemed absolutely perfect to describe what I found missing in last Wednesday's meeting where progress on an update to the Salem Area Comprehensive Plan was discussed by City of Salem staff and hired consultants.

This photo of the beginning of the "Our Salem" open house in the Court Street Christian Church captures the non-electricity of the gathering, which attracted about 30-40 people.

Sure, it was a warm sunny day, so sitting inside from 6-8 pm, or thereabouts, likely didn't sound all that appealing to some potential attendees. Still, the first page of a meeting handout said:

Now we ask:

"Are we heading in the right direction?""What is our community vision for the future?"

It could be that the now didn't really refer to this meeting, but to the Future Work described on the handout that sounds a lot more exciting.

Establishing a community vision for future growth, and updating the Comprehensive Plan.

-- What do we value?-- How do we want Salem to grow and develop?-- What goals do we have?-- How can we improve our community?-- What goals and policies do we want to guide development and how we grow?

Don't get me wrong: the meeting was well organized and the staff/consultants did a good job. I'm just hoping, and waiting, for the Future Work that is billed as starting in Summer 2019.

"Why?" and "How?" are the only questions that need to be asked. Why is an upper-level question. How explains what's needed to attain the Why. Why's and How's alternate as needed for a particular situation.

For example, why does Salem exist? This is a top-level question that I've never heard asked, much less adequately answered. It, or a question very much like it, should be part of the Comprehensive Plan update. Here's some answers that I think ordinary people would offer up:

To help people who live here be happy To be an economic center with good jobsTo preserve Oregon farm and forest land by limiting urban sprawl

There are many other possible answers, of course. My point is just that unless simple high-level vision questions are asked and answered first, a planning process is prone to veer off into bureaucratic objective/criteria setting that isn't grounded in fundamental human values.

I did enjoy the Q&A portion of the meeting. That's when people expressed what matters to them in everyday language. Such as, dealing with income inequality, having as much open space as possible, reducing carbon emissions.

This shows greenhouse gas emissions for all of Oregon, with the red line at the top being projected emissions under current policies and the steeply descending yellow line being "Oregon's statewide GHG goal trajectory to 2050."

Wow. If Salem is to do its part in meeting this goal, our city has to markedly reduce its carbon pollution, particularly in the transportation sector. The good news is, this subject is filled with...pizazz! Here's some pizazz'y buzz words.

Less driving, more walking and bicycling.Dedicated bike paths all over town.Young and old meeting as they safely and happily walk and bike.Expanded mass transit that everyone wants to use.A downtown designed for people, not cars.Electric vehicles, including buses, everywhere.Rapid charging stations everywhere. Trees planted everyplace possible.Open space preserved everywhere possible.Zoning that allows restaurants/shopping in more residential areas.Wider choice of energy-efficient housing.

I'm sure other people could add to these ideas. But what I've listed excites me. More ideas would excite me even more.

Hopefully future Our Salem meetings will involve visioning exercises that attract lots of people eager to explore and discuss how they want Salem to change for the better. With... pizazz.

October 31, 2018

It's great that a bicycle sharing program, Capitol City Cycleshare, is set to begin around late January to mid-February.

Aside from giving people in Salem an easy and inexpensive way to cycle, another benefit is that the program will show how difficult it is to ride a bicycle in most parts of our town.

An email message I got from Evan Osborne, who is leading the Cycleshare effort, says that seven stations are planned, with money currently available for six stations.

Hello Cycleshare Sponsors and Advocates,

I am happy to announce all legal teams are in consensus with a formal agreement giving permission for our cycleshare program to operate within Salem's public properties! This agreement has been put on the agenda to be approved by the City Council, November 13th. Once approved, we will be moving forward with station installs. Our vendor has made a tentative 60-day install commitment. This means we are looking at a late January to mid-February launch!

Currently, we have six of the planned seven stations accounted for financially. If you know of other organizations and/or individuals who may want to align with our efforts in growing the program, please send them our way!

Thank you for your continued advocacy and support.

Kind Regards,

Evan

The Cycleshare web site shows the location of four stations. A Statesman Journal story says these will be at: Salem's Riverfront Carousel, the Union Street Railroad Bridge, Courthouse's West Salem location and the Downtown Transit Center.

This makes sense, since it is the only part of Salem with access to safe, pleasant, easy-to-ride multiuse trails at Minto-Brown Island Park, Riverfront Park, and Wallace Marine Park.

But that leaves almost all of Salem as almost entirely lacking places to ride a bicycle that, at best, are denoted by painted lines on a busy road filled with vehicles whizzing by a few feet (or even a few inches) away.

After noting the usage of bike share programs in Portland, Eugene, and Corvallis -- 1 to 3 trips per day per bicycle -- came these observations about Salem's program, which will start with 30 bikes from the ridesharing company Zagster:

So if we expect something more like one trip per day per bike, that's 30 new bike trips each day.

That might be a nice amenity for tourism marketing and cachet, but that's not a meaningful difference in downtown transportation.

So, you know, start small, hope for success, and build off of that. But we should be clear this is a perk or amenity, not a difference-maker for mobility.

It's an ornament.

It's also not clear that there will be much riding outside of the Wallace-Riverfront-Minto Park system. To be sure, that the Union and Minto Bridges connect them all is a great boon! But that's recreating, not commuting or utility cycling.

I'll confess that our tour was a combination of cycling and walking. This mom errs on the side of caution when it comes to bicycling with kids. I'm very thankful for the new bike lanes recently created in downtown Salem, but when the map took us on busy streets where bikes and cars travel together, we walked our bikes on the sidewalk. [italics added]

One of the probable consequences of having a public bike system downtown without also adjusting the streets, especially for east-west travel, is that we will have more sidewalk biking.

Altogether, what I see is a city that likes the idea of being able to say it has a bikeshare system, as a kind of symbol of hip culture, but not a city that's really very passionate yet about making it easy to bike and ensuring that riders have the right infrastructure, especially downtown where the stations are clustered.

Right on.

Earlier this month I noted in a blog post that the 2018 City of Salem Community Report had only one mention of bicycling, and that was in a section about LED street lamps.

I searched the report for every mention of "bicycle." There was exactly one. Here it is. LED lamps provide good lighting for bicycles, along with cars and pedestrians. Whoopee.

Of course, that assumes it is safe and easy to read a bicycle in Salem, which it isn't. The absence of any mention of bike paths or dedicated multiuse paths shows how autocentric City of Salem policies are. We're way behind other cities in Oregon in this regard.

Hopefully Capitol City Cycleshare will help spur a redirection of resources away from hugely expensive road projects to much more cost-effective protected paths for cyclists, pedestrians, skateboarders, scooter riders, and other alternative ways of getting around town.

When people sign up for the Cycleshare program and start riding the bikes, they're going to find that it's neither easy nor safe to cycle in Salem in most places outside of the "tri-park" area where the first stations will be located.

Complaining to City officials and city councilors to do something about this will be in order.